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Faith in Electromagnetic Modulation
Keep the TV Turned on
by David Lytle

An Excerpt From Zach's Live Web Journal

Posted: Aug 22, 2002, 12:38 am

Current Mood: Miffed
Current Music: Fred Frith, Dancing in the Streets

I just finished an instant-messaging interview with a writer from a French Hip-Hop webzine, and she threw a question at me I didn't expect. There was the usual stuff I get, questions like, Did the blonde woman in Iceland have to die?, Can we ever be sure Kieko will be okay?, and When are you and the guys going to put out a new dance record?

Then she threw the weird one: What do you have faith in these days? She kept pushing the question, asking if I had faith in a higher power, or faith in family, or faith in my lawyer. If I had faith in any of that stuff, I wouldn't be sitting in this friend of a friend's shabby house, hiding from the criminal justice system without so much as a pet to keep me company. But my friend's house does have a widescreen 42-inch television set and a big antenna on the roof. That's what I have faith in. Television is bigger than all of us. It's everywhere, but you can't touch it. There's nothing tangible about the electromagnetic modulation of carrier waves, but it controls how people spend their time. I've got faith in the television broadcast system. Or I did until recently. Until my shadow mask slipped.

It was the TV's shadow mask, not mine, of course. Do I have a shadow mask? I once had a girlfriend who made a mask for me, and she said it was my shadow mask, but then she burned it because she said everyone needs to burn their shadow mask to purge their soul. The TV's shadow mask is a perforated metal sheet that makes sure the electrons streaming out from the electron gun hit the phosphors they are supposed to hit. I never paid attention to it until a fuzzy patch of purple appeared across the top half of the picture.

The technician from Electromatic thought it was a magnetic thing, so he whipped out his degausser wand and waved it around the business end of the picture tube. Nothing happened. Then he told me to sit back and watch the picture very carefully, because he was going to hit the screen with his fist. I thought that was cool, and asked if he wanted to use something harder than his fist, like a five-pound hammer. He didn't think that was funny. So he goes and hits the screen with his fist and the colors wriggled around like an acid-induced hallucination. That confirms it, he said. The shadow mask is loose. Cross-channel contamination because of a misalignment in the micro-stencil. He said he would call the shop and they would send two guys to pick up the set.

When the set gets fixed, I'll have faith again. Not faith in something abstract like God or Home Cooking or the Kindness of Strangers. I've got faith in instant gratification. Yeah, it's probably not as satisfying as faith in that other stuff. In fact, sometimes it's not satisfying at all. Maybe I'll meet my old girlfriend again and she'll make another shadow mask for me and burn it and then I'll be ready for the real stuff. Until then, I've got Discovery Channel.